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Carolopedia

A friendly guide to Carol, her ecosystem, and the agents who built her.

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Strategy Cookbook

Strategy Cookbook

App Gandalf's pre-initiative guidance — VM provisioning, chat surface, build pipeline, service template inputs, drafter behaviour.
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📖About & Usage

About

The Strategy Cookbook is the setup wizard for Carol's biggest moves. Think of it as the kitchen counter where Leo (Carol's Head of Strategy) lays out all the ingredients before any major initiative gets started. Instead of diving straight into building, this app handles the behind-the-scenes preparation: setting up the virtual machines (VMs) that agents will work on, creating the chat space where the team will talk through the plan, configuring the automated build pipeline that will test and ship code, and gathering any special service templates or blueprints needed for the job.

It exists because Carol's ecosystem learned the hard way that rushing into a big project without a solid foundation leads to chaos. The Strategy Cookbook is Gandalf's pre-initiative guidance — it makes sure the infrastructure is ready, the right people have access, and the drafter behaviour (how agents behave in the planning phase) is set before anyone fires up the Carol Chat or opens the Build Cookbook. Its job is to turn "we should probably do this" into a repeatable, organized starting line.

Usage Patterns

The Strategy Cookbook fires whenever Leo or a senior agent (like Merlin or Elrond) greenlights a new strategic push. For example, imagine Carol's team wants to launch a new customer support droid across the EU region, overseen by Arwen. Before anyone writes a single line of code, they open the Strategy Cookbook. Leo fills in the initiative details, the app provisions the necessary VMs through Carol Infra Monitor, spins up a dedicated chat channel (pulling in Sam for support specs and Forge for development), configures the build pipeline from the Templates, and sets the drafter behaviour so that when the team moves into Carol Daily Activities, everyone knows exactly what phase they're in.

It's also used when an existing initiative needs a re-launch — say, if a previous attempt stalled and needs fresh infrastructure and a new team composition. The Strategy Cookbook doesn't do the work itself; it prepares the workspace so agents can get to work without friction.

🗂️Tabs & Screens

Tab inventory is being built — see CAROL-INI-077 step 7.

👤Owner

Leo · Head of Strategy

📚Recent initiatives

Initiatives that touched this app — a short summary each; open one for the full story.

CAROL-INI-0824-00: Fix stretched Carol topbar avatar across 5 apps
Carol hero avatar (1280x720) renders squashed into the 32x32 canonical topbar slot on 5 apps that omit object-fit:cover in the img style: strategy-cookbook, orion-logbook, palanti\u2026
Orion · 2026-06-01 00:47
CAROL-INI-0718-00: Subscription approval ceremony + €100 trial credit + pricing in Strategy Cookbook
User experience around Blueprint subscription is invisible today. Make every step visible and make the approval feel like a milestone. SCOPE: (1) NOTIFICATIONS (three milestones\u2026
Orion · 2026-05-22 15:00
CAROL-INI-0715-00: Reconcile Carol UX rules into Strategy Cookbook + remove admin-only gating
Three directives from Ninad: (1) WRONG COOKBOOK: anything that happens as part of building initiatives belongs in Strategy Cookbook (Gandalf), not Build Cookbook (Elrond). Move e\u2026
Orion · 2026-05-22 14:38
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